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What is a meme?

Meme is a big word lately. In the sense of guys like TechMeme, it means a recurring subject or story that people are talking about. A topic like the ban on gambling in Second Life is a meme in this sense.

We use meme a little more broadly. First coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the term meme is defined as "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." A story's topic is certainly an important meme, but other memes (other ideas or characteristics) are important to FeedHub in deciding how much you will like a post. For example, FeedHub has a meme for items that are on the del.icio.us hotlist. Over time, we will add other memes to capture important characteristics of a story, like its author, number of incoming links, and even its writing style.

User "set" versus system "learned" memes

Left to its own devices, FeedHub infers the strength of a meme from your reading behavior - posts you click through on or tag, email, etc. You can also explicitly tell FeedHub how strongly you want a particular meme to influence which posts are chosen for you.

This Category meme was learned by FeedHub, meaning that it was inferred from a complex alchemy of inputs, including your reading behavior. This meme finds posts in the category Web Design and Development, and FeedHub believes that you really like getting posts on this category.

Maybe you like seeing the posts found by this meme, but not as much as FeedHub thinks you like them! You can set the meme and tell FeedHub that you would like to see posts from the category Web Design and Development only sometimes.

IMPORTANT! Memes you create in your feed, or memes whose strength you set by editing, are the only memes that the system will not automatically replace with better-performing ones when it finds them!

Changing other meme properties

Some memes have options that you can change. For example, the Tagged Topics meme finds posts tagged by a particular del.icio.us user. You can edit the meme to change the del.icio.us user to which it points or the time period for which you want to see tags.

Where do memes come from?

Memes get developed at mSpoke, and new kinds of memes are being designed all the time. We develop new kinds of memes when we have new ideas for how to choose the content that you will like most. If you have an idea for a meme, we would love to hear it. Email us at contact@feedhub.com.

What kinds of memes are there?

Right now, FeedHub has memes based on posts' content, social web information and the current popularity of the topic. While we are always developing new memes, here are the memes that FeedHub is using right now.

Content memes

These memes are based on the content of the actual posts examined. These are system-learned memes and cannot be added by the user.

• A Topic meme represents the topic of the post. FeedHub automatically creates topics by finding clusters of similar posts and then studying those clusters to choose the best topic names. Topics are generally associated with current events, and live from a few weeks to a few months.
• A Category meme represents the subject area of the post. We maintain a category hierarchy based loosely on Wikipedia, and FeedHub automatically classifies each post into this hierarchy.

Social web memes

These memes evaluate posts based on the social web information connected with them.

• A del.icio.us Hotlist meme looks for items from your source feeds that also appear in the del.icio.us hotlist.
• A Tagged Topics meme looks for items from your source feeds which are on the same topics as items that specific individuals have recently tagged in del.icio.us. You might want to create a Tagged Topics meme based on your own del.icio.us account, or the accounts of some of your friends.
• A Hot Topics meme looks for posts that are on topics being talked about by a lot more source feeds today than in previous days.
• A Personal Hot Topics meme looks for posts on topics that are being talked about much more in your source feeds than in the world at large.
• A Popularly Linked meme looks for posts that are linked to by lots of popular feeds.
• A Most Commented meme looks for posts that have more comments than is typical for other items in the same feeds.
• A Popular on Digg meme that looks for posts with lots of Diggs.

Covered in Groups memes

These memes use sets of feeds that we have chosen as being representative groups of widely-read feeds. These memes look for posts with topics mentioned by these groups.

• In Popular Feeds
• In Top News Feeds
• In Sports Feeds
• In Gadgets Feeds
• In VC Feeds
• In TechCrunch

Last but not least, there is an Author Provided Category meme looks for posts tagged with a particular category by the author. While you cannot create an instance of this meme, you may encounter one that results from the content in your feeds.

Why is this meme smiling at me?

The meme display uses colored areas to denote the strength of a meme - how confident FeedHub is that you'll like the content. This icon is an at-a-glance reminder of the meme's strength.

• FeedHub is confident you'll like posts found by this meme.
• FeedHub feels there's a good chance you'll like posts found by this meme.
• FeedHub feels there's some chance you'll like posts found by this meme.

What are sample items?

These are items from your feeds that have matched this meme, whether or not they were shown to you in your personalized feed. The sample items are a useful way of evaluating whether or not you like this meme.